Backpass: Yes, it really is that bad
The Super League is instilling panic in a lot of the soccer world. That panic is justified - things could get pretty ugly.
Note: As I was writing this, Chelsea, Arsenal, and Atletico Madrid are supposedly pulling out of the Super League. However, turmoil still reigns, and we don’t know what comes next. Read on.
You have undoubtedly heard the announcement, and probably much of the punditry and consternation, around this new European Super League. Heck, my mother-in-law, who avoids paying attention to sports like it was garbage being tossed out of a second-floor window, was familiar with all the ins and outs of the controversy.1
And I think, after almost 72 hours of digesting the information and attempting to wrap our collective heads around it, we might ask ‘ok, are we all over-reacting? Maybe this isn’t that bad.’ I’m here to argue that yes, it is really that bad.
To do that, I’ll take us through a few of the possible scenarios of how this situation plays itself out.
First, let me attempt to summarize this proposal of a European Super League for us extremely succinctly.2 Twelve European teams are forming their own league of 20. The twelve teams include six from England, three from Spain, and three from Italy.3 There are three spots yet to be determined, but they likely won’t include any teams from Germany4, including UEFA Champions-league reigning champ Bayern Munich. Those 15 teams will be permanent members of this new European Super League - five other teams will be invited each year to participate.
Will these teams still play games in their domestic leagues? Unclear. Signs point to no.
Will these teams still be in UEFA Champions League? Highly doubtful - this competition is clearly a direct competitor with UCL.
It is a massive earthquake to world football. Here are some possibly ways it might shake out.
The league succeeds - and decimates world football as a result
We’re going to start from the worst possible scenario and work backward. Honestly, nobody has a clue which of these is most likely to come to fruition, so I might just as well start with the most depressing version and move towards the best (in my humble opinion) outcome.
The Super League kicks off in August, 2021 - with the 12 named teams plus three more yet-unknown teams, and five guest teams. Between now and then, FIFA and UEFA carry out all of the threats they have levied to date: teams involved are removed immediately from the current UCL. Teams are kicked out of the Champions League, the Europa League, FIFA Club Cup, and their domestic leagues and cups. Players on those teams, including Lionel Messi, Ronaldo, Tony Kroos, Kylian Mbappé, Weston McKennie, and Christian Pulisic are banned from this summers’ UEFA Euros, the Olympics, and the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
Distraught domestic fans of teams like Real Madrid and Liverpool are disgusted at the idea of supporting their local teams - the ones that their grandparents used to take them to as little kids - if they aren’t playing Deportivo La Coruña or Everton. They desert the sport, heartbroken, and ignore their own domestic leagues as well, since they no longer have a team to support. But the league doesn’t care, because they have TV money from Asia and the Middle East flowing in. The players care - but only until the teams hand them $3 million a piece to soothe the ache of missing the World Cup.
The men’s version of World Cup, bereft of the biggest stars, experiences its first large TV dip in modern history.
Domestic leagues and teams take a massive financial hit, too, as some of the gate revenues and TV revenue that Newcastle or Bologna would have received from playing Chelsea or Juventus is gone. Fans are bewildered wondering ‘is it really Serie A if the top two teams are Crotone and Fiorentino - and they never play Milan or Juve?’
The Champions League money that used to flow to teams is cut significantly, as UCL becomes the European version of the NIT. The Europa League is canceled altogether. With all of this revenue now shift away from leagues and towards the anointed 15 teams, down-pyramid revenue is cut. As a result, several smaller teams fold altogether.
And by 2025, with fewer eyeballs, less money, and little or no hope of getting into the Super League, even some of the larger teams in Europe find themselves in trouble. Suddenly the seemingly rare stories of teams in free-fall - the Sunderlands, the Parmas, and the Portsmouths of the world - become not-so-rare. The shakeout and the chaos consumes a decades worth of fandom. Soccer, once the world’s most popular sport, declines.
(Wow. That was dark. Deep breath.)
An Uneasy Truce
Seeing that an all-out secession from the global football ecosystem might actually be bad for business, after initial volleys, jockeying, and threats, the interested parties (the heads of the clubs, the heads of the big leagues, and the honchos at UEFA and FIFA) sit down and negotiate over the next year.
What they agree to is a classic compromise - nobody’s thrilled, but everybody gets a little something.
In exchange for killing the Super League, the owners of the big 12 clubs find a way to ensure a bigger payout and a longer run in the UEFA Champions League. They negotiate a 60% cut of income from all matches in Champions League as long as their team has not yet been eliminated. They further negotiate a semi-closed system - teams earn a spot in UCL via a co-efficient system based on three years of results, and new teams can only enter or exit every three years. Teams stay in their domestic leagues. Players of the near-breakaway clubs get to play in the World Cup. UEFA and the big 12 hang together in an uneasy truce - for now.
Suffer the Lash of UEFA
This scenario is - kind of bonkers to me. But it seems like a viable possibility.
The gambit of the breakaway clubs is roundly punished - teams are expelled from domestic leagues and UEFA. But the players revolt - so many are terrified and repulsed by the idea of being soccer pariahs for life if they take part in the rogue league that they bolt. UEFA and FIFA, smartly, rule that their contracts with their clubs are invalidated once they left the fold, and they offer the players amnesty if they jump ship.
The new league battles behind the scenes valiantly to lure the players in, but rather than nab the Messis and Mbappes, they get stuck with a whole bunch of 29 to 36 year-old former-stars who would gladly take a massive pay raise to play in a bandit league, especially since they weren’t going to make it onto their national team’s lineup at the World Cup anyway. This is basically the worst iteration of America’s NASL in its later years, come back to life: a washed and besotted George Best surrounded by 10 guys who aren’t that good, baking under the Florida sun against seven Brazilian has-beens and three American never-will-bes. Except now, maybe it’s an entire league where every team is twenty-eight washed guys.
Fans see through the new league for what it is - an off-brand, low quality, retirement-league version of Arsenal and Chelsea, or rather “Arsenal” and “Chelsea”. Ratings are terrible. The league flounders, fumbles, and dies, perhaps not even making it to the end of a full sporting year. Europe has its XFL moment.
In 2022, the clubs admit failure and return to their domestic leagues, where various punishments await them. None are permitted to play Champions League for 3 years. Profits suffer. Some teams even sink to the second division. It is a long road back to financial and on-field success for all of them.
A true Champions League emerges - and everybody wins
The problem with European football, as many see it, is too many irrelevant games. Why should I tune in to watch Barcelona-Getafe or Bayern-Frankfurt when the gap in quality (and salaries) is insane? The gulf between the top teams in the league and the bottom - and the financial rules that allow such a margin to exist - have long made for a lot of soccer between mammoths and minnows.
On some level, the Super League was simply a blunt instrument that attempted to solve this problem: get rid of the meaningless games, and acknowledge the reality that fans want to see more Champions League-level football and less of the Champions murdering newly promoted teams that can’t hope to compete. And fans want their team to have a shot at it, and they want to watch that game on Saturday, not on Tuesday.
To that end, if the Super League is willing to open itself up and allow annual promotion and relegation, it can solve a problem instead of create one.
Imagine something like the Champions League as it exists now, except instead of being a midweek destination for teams, its a new pan-European league, above all the others. The top 24 teams in Europe, as determined by the 2021 season record and ELO rating and coefficient, are promoted to the ‘Super League’. Every year, those teams only play in the Super League, not their domestic league. No more watching Messi chop up Eibar or Norwich play dire, park-the-bus football against Paul Pogba. They play 36 games, plus their domestic cup.5 And at the end of every year, the top 12 teams in that league stay in their league, and the bottom 12 return to their leagues and are replaced.
Why such a massive relegation? Because it’s fair, that’s why. If the money in the Super League is going to be phenomenal - and it likely is - it needs to be available to a larger group of clubs.6 Rotate them, give more of them a crack, and you restore the balance and the best intentions of a true super league - to make sure that the best players and the best teams spend most of their time playing the other best players and the other best teams.
This is a potential great outcome (in my humble opinion) that generated from a bad starting point - this abominable Super League.
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While it’s easy to point out that MLS lacks promotion and relegation - and therefore is the kind of greed-fueled billionaire-owners club for teams - at least MLS has caps and DPs and salary rules that allow all the teams to be reasonably competitive every year. That is not the case with Super League, and so the ability to gain permanent entry to the best league, and then spend as little as possible to stay in it against European superstar opponents- or as much as you like to assemble your dream team - is kind of like taking the worst elements of MLS and combining them with the worst elements of European football.
I mean, I can tell you whats going to happen in this league right now if it goes forth as planned and none of the players run away from it. Arsenal will finish near the bottom; Stan Kroenke is already happy to turn a profit in the EPL while spending modestly to finish eight, so why would a Super League be any different? And Manchester City will win it, because they literally have the royal finances of the entire Qatari empire behind them.7
Of all the many things that blow my mind about this situation, the reality is this: we simply do not know. I laid out what I think are four plausible possibilities for the path forward, and yet I am the first to acknowledge that we are in such turmoil that something wilder and even more implausible might even emerge.
I really hope it isn’t that bad, but I think, at least in the short term, we are likely to see some really bad things happen to soccer in Europe, and its effect will be felt around the world.
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And now for something completely different. And brief
The Rapids played to a 0-0 draw against FC Dallas this week - which considering we really needed to talk about this Super League thing, is kind of a relief. I do not feel the need to comment too much on it. In short:
The Rapids and FCD had some fun chances early - and Michael Barrios was dangerous, but ultimately neither team converted. Both keepers were stellar. At the half, both sides buttoned things up, Dallas prevented further Rapids set-piece opportunities, and the game ended in a draw.
Hopefully I’ll be able to focus on the Austin match this week instead of having to continue to discuss this European kerfuffle.
Talking about an actual soccer game instead of the business of soccer, might get fewer clicks, but it is far and away a lot more pleasant to consider, win lose or draw.
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My mother-in-law lives in Israel, a country where football is the national sport and where La Liga is the most watched sporting event each week- more popular by far than Israel’s own ‘Ligat HaAl’.
If you want the broader strokes and you subscribe to the New York Times (or have not blown through your free articles limit for the month) I think Tariq Panja and Rory Smith explained it extremely well in depth here.
From the time I started the article to the time I clicked ‘publish’, three had allegedly dropped out. That’s insane.
The German Bundesliga has a 50+1 rule in which teams must be held by the supporter-based public trust. This means that a German team is inherently interested in what fans want, and not simply focused on maximizing profits. As a result, it’s hard to see any outcome where the German teams leave. Which will likely be weird - it’s possible that football in 2022 is one in which, for the first time in decades, we literally can’t point to a team and definitely say ‘that is the best football team on earth.’ Instead, there’ll be an ESL champ, a Bundesliga champ, and perhaps even an English or Italian team that was very good but wasn’t invited to be in ESL. Think boxing and the many-acronymed title belts.
OK, I love my own idea here (he said with all the self-awareness of a fifteen-year old with clear skin and no braces at a Cotillion dance.) Domestic tournaments like Copa Del Rey and FA Cup are generally kind of second-tier. But if the best teams in your country are away on Super League duty and no longer play in the top domestic league, BUT they play the domestic cup, then suddenly that midweek match between Arsenal and Fulham is special - because there’s literally no other way for those two London clubs to meet otherwise.
I daresay I’d support relegating the bottom 20 of the 24 if that didn’t potentially create a worse version of the same problem of fueling super clubs - those top four clubs, if they could hang on year after year, would become the most perennially wealthy and powerful clubs in Europe. That’s why the boring part of any Super League article - a long explanation of profit sharing and salary capping and financial fairplay that I’m not gonna do - is actually the most important part of this whole mechanism.
I can see a world where the ultra ultra rich start vying for these teams and players with zero regard for profitability - they simply become the playthings of obscenely rich collectors. This is basically the plot of Thor: Ragnarok and a Star Trek:TNG episode called ‘The Most Toys’ in which Data is kidnapped because he’s priceless. Shit is broken enough that a creepy Jeff Goldblum character might become like an actual thing.